Newswatch

By Thomas Griffith

Perhaps by now there is a consensus that Gary Hart brought himself down by his willful behavior. But at the outset of the scandal, a large part of the public was ready to blame the press for invading his privacy, and many still do. Questions about the role the press played continue to echo among journalists.

An English observer of the Hart affair, Alexander Chancellor, who is the U.S. editor of the new London daily Independent, thinks American political scandals are usually about money, while British political scandals are about sex.

Respectable American papers scorn the sleazy Fleet Street practice of entrapping prominent Brits in love nests. So when the respectable Miami Herald tailed Hart and his friend, it angered Columnist A.M. Rosenthal, until recently the top editor of the New York Times. He indignantly wrote, "I did not become a newspaperman to hide outside a politician's house trying to find out whether he was in bed with somebody." When it comes to scandal, the New York Times is up above the world so high. Its readers must have been puzzled to read that Hart's reputation as a womanizer was well known to those who get their news elsewhere. But there is a touch of self-righteousness in papers that practice what might be called "second-strike" journalism, fastidiously not printing something until others have made it news, then eagerly joining in the chase.

The truth is that there are two kinds of news, the important and the interesting, and most readers and viewers feel entitled to both. In fact, the simplest way to judge the coverage of any newspaper, magazine, or television news program -- network or local -- is to measure which kind of news it accents the most, the important or the interesting. Like every big news story, Gary Hart's downfall happily combined both. But since hypocrisy is as endemic in the press as it is in politics, the press defended its behavior by stressing the importance of the story. Importance did not require a competition to see who could get the sexiest picture of Donna Rice with Hart, which the scandal tabloid National Enquirer won.

The issue in the Hart story, it was frequently argued in editorials, was not sex, it was character. There have been acres of speculation, some of it good and some of it mere psychobabble, about his will to self-destruct. But the question of privacy invaded remains. Why was the Miami Herald in such a hurry that it could not even wait to check its facts properly? And what right did Reporter Paul Taylor of the Washington Post have to ask Hart at that televised press conference, "Have you ever committed adultery?" To such a question, said Columnist William Safire, the proper answer is "Go to hell." Ben Bradlee, the Post's executive editor, did not quite condemn his reporter's intrusive question but lamely put it back on Hart: "I can't think of anyone else you'd ask it of."

The ancient gentlemen's agreement in the press to ignore Franklin Roosevelt's and Jack Kennedy's adulteries no longer holds. Even more marked is the change in feminist attitudes toward wives who traditionally rally around their erring husbands. Instead of the usual sob-sister sympathy, Sally Quinn wrote in the Washington Post, "This is 1987. Divorce is not only possible, it's acceptable." Myra MacPherson, in the same paper, thought Lee Hart, in playing the role of Wife as Political Prop, only confirmed her husband's "callous disregard" for her feelings. The Boston Globe's columnist Ellen Goodman does not think the press has become obsessed with the candidates' sex lives; it has simply taken "sex out of the exempt category."

In an age of candidates with familiar personalities but insufficiently known characters, the press grows more curious about their private lives. But it does so uneasily, and has yet to find the right balance in handling it.